1. The Craft of Scientific Writing
Michael Alley
College of Engineering
Penn State
These teaching slides, which are used in professional and university courses, are for instructors who use The Craft of Scientific Writing (3rd ed., Springer-Verlag) in their courses. This first set of slides draws on material from Chapter 1.
This first slide is a title slide for an introductory lecture about writing in engineering and science. With this title slide, you have the opportunity to give your own testimony as to the importance of writing in engineering and science. This slide is also an opportunity for you to mention two references (the shown web site and textbook) that students have for improving their writing.
Note that these slides use the term “scientific writing” to encompass the writing done by engineers and scientists and the term “scientific documents” to encompass the documents written by engineers and scientists. If you prefer the more general term “technical,” you can use the Replace command to replace “scientific” with “technical” throughout. Likewise, if you desire a term more specific than “scientific,” you can use the same command to insert your preferred term (“engineering” or “biological” would be two examples). Note that all future references to chapters and pages are for The Craft of Scientific Writing (3rd edition).

2. How well you communicate affects your career
Survey (Richard M. Davis)
Successful engineers spent 25% of work week writing
Survey (Wisconsin)
Professional engineers found writing their most useful subject in college
With this background slide, I try to convince students of the importance of scientific writing. This slide presents three surveys that show different points about the importance of writing for engineers. The first survey was performed by Richard M. Davis of the Air Force who surveyed 245 distinguished engineers. This survey not only found the result presented on this slide (25% of work week spent on writing), but also found that those surveyed attributed their success in part to their ability to communicate. Source: Richard M. Davis, Technical Writing: Its Importance in the Engineering Profession and Its Place in the Engineering Curriculum, AFIT TR 75-5 (Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio: Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, 1975).
The second survey was performed by Dean John Bollinger from the College of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin who contacted 9000 engineers who had graduated. The slide shows an important result of that survey (that the engineers found writing to be their most useful subject). Interestingly, the second most useful skill cited was the ability to speak. Source: Dean John G. Bollinger, “Alumni Survey Results,” Perspective (Madison: College of Engineering, University of Wisconsin, Summer 1994), p. 2.
The third survey was performed by the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech. Here, recruiters to Virginia Tech were polled. The purpose of the survey was to determine what skills that engineering graduates needed most improvement upon. Source: Virginia Tech, College of Engineering, “Summary Report of Employer Focus Group” (October 2000).
Survey (Virginia Tech)
Recruiters claim that engineers need more work on their writing

3. The documents in a project often follow a specific sequence
Proposals
Papers, Posters,
and Final Reports
Ideas
Progress Reports
In engineering and scientific projects, we write a number of documents—from proposals to obtain funding, to progress reports to update sponsors about the work to papers, reports, and posters to document the research. In addition, to communicate details about the project at all of these stages, we write correspondence.

4. You should begin the process of scientific writing by analyzing your constraints
who are they?
what do they know?
why are they reading?
what biases do they have?
audience
purpose
occasion
to inform
to persuade
This slide is perhaps the most important slide of the set because it shows what constraints students are under as they begin writing a scientific document. In other words, this slide tells students where they should begin the writing process (an assumption here is that the students understand the content of their document and now must communicate that content). The constraints of audience, purpose, and occasion are discussed in Chapter 1 (pages 2-9)
Before animating in the specifics, ask the students what are the most important questions that a writer should ask about audience. Be sure to emphasize the why question, as discussed in Chapter 1. Also, be sure to discuss the differences in style that occur between documents that are mainly informative and those that are mainly persuasive (also discussed in Chapter 1).
The aspect of format is also discussed in Chapter 16 and in the “Writing Guidelines for Engineering and Science Students.” The aspect of process refers to how the student actually puts words onto paper. Will the student write as an individual or part of a group? Does the student have a fixed deadline? Chapter 17 discusses this aspect in more detail. Formality refers to the expectations that the audience has as far as mechanics, which is also discussed in Chapter 1, Appendix A, and Appendix B. Interactive exercises for mechanics can be found in the “Writing Exercises for Engineers and Scientists.”
On this slide, you should make it clear to the students that no simple recipes exist for the challenging documents that they will have to write. Students should assess the audience, format, formality, and other constraints of the situation before committing words to paper. The slides that follow elaborate on each of the constraints.
form
process
General Scientific Document

5. Form embodies the format and mechanics of the writing
grammar
usage
punctuation
spelling
format
typography
layout
Information about the format of scientific writing can be found on pages 6-7 in Chapter 1 and in Chapter 16. Information about the mechanics of scientific writing can be found in Appendices A and B (and in The Craft of Editing (Springer-Verlag, 2000).
This image shows perhaps the most famous scientific paper of the 20th century—the explanation for the structure of DNA. You can point out that this paper, which was published in Nature, has a number of formatting characteristics: two columns, indented paragraphs, serif typeface, reference citations done in a certain way.

6. Exercise: Pair up and discuss the audience of your next document
who are they?
what do they know?
why are they reading?
what biases do they have?
audience
Exercise that follows previous discussion.

7. This course focuses on style, which is the way that you express the ideas of your work
Structure
Language
Mapping for set of teaching slides (CSW, pages 9-15). Note that I usually explain the analogy of the mountain on this slide (The Craft of Scientific Presentations, 2nd ed., pp ):
Structure (Chapters 2-3)
Language (Chapters 4-9)
Illustration (Chapters 10-11)
References for Pictures:
Mount Everest: "IMG 2124 Everest" by Luca Galuzzi (Lucag) - Photo taken by (Luca Galuzzi) * Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons -
Einstein Statue, Washington, D.C.: photo by Michael Alley
Cutaway Engine: Pratt&Whitney
Illustration